UN Office of the Special Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide and the International Criminal Court Prosecutor: Investigate the Possibility that Israel is Committing the Crime of Genocide Against the Palestinian People

Sinn Féin MEP Liadh Ní Riada has called for the ending of all EU funding to Israel. “Israel must be completely excluded from receiving any funding for research and development,” she said. “Every penny that they have received under the research and development scheme, which they have egregiously abused, makes the EU complicit in each and every murder Israel has carried out since 2000. That’s over 10,000 Palestinians. More than 2000 of them children. The EU’s Horizon 2020 is the biggest research and development programme in the world, with €80billion dedicated to it since 2014. Israel is allowed to take part in the programme on the basis of the EU-Israel association agreement, signed in 2000. An outrageous agreement that we warned two decades would only give legitimacy to Israel’s campaign of genocide.

A party with members in Israel’s government has just endorsed a plan to force Palestinians out of their homeland. A prominent Holocaust scholar previously called the plan potentially genocidal and likened the values of its chief proponent to those of the Nazi SS. Yet the European Union, which claims a moral mission to combat extremism, racism and xenophobia, is refusing to condemn it.

The European Union has hired an Israeli who advocates genocidal violence against Palestinians as the face of a new promotional campaign. Avishai Ivri appears in a video the EU embassy in Tel Aviv posted on its Facebook page last month…

Mandatory Western-style Holocaust education in EU member states further reinforces the Holocaust as the ultimate genocide and Jews as the ultimate victim group. While this was intended to prevent a recurrence, the unintended consequence has been to create a jostling for position as victims among other peoples. David conjectures that the Holocaust has been unintentionally established as the paradigm through which other genocides are perceived; thus, even Palestinians have accepted Holocaust education to some extent. By memorializing the Holocaust, Palestinians, Serbians, Croatians and others assume a platform of morality that allows them to push their own claims for victim status, and for similar reparations and memorialization of their own genocides.

“More than 40 per cent of Europeans believe that Israel carries out genocide against Palestinians, Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett said a recent report showed. During the Sunday meeting of the Israeli government, Bennett blamed Europe for the result of the report, saying that Europe is becoming anti-Semitic and the EU leaders are not taking action to stop this… The report pointed out that the BDS movement had been very successful in Europe and other parts of the world despite Israeli efforts to tackle it.”

Now is already beyond time for a paradigm shift that will consign the repressive, neo-colonial policies of Likud Zionism to the dustbin of the 20th century. A Jewish homeland is one thing: genocide is another and European arms exporters to Israel must take action to avoid becoming potential accessories to criminal activity on a substantial scale.

Hebrew University has kept on lending its support to Israel’s acts of genocide. When Israel attacked Gaza in the summer of 2014, the university undertook a fundraising drive so that soldiers taking part in the offensive could be offered scholarships…

Its staff have been known to sit on committees assessing planned appointments at Ariel University, which is located deep in the West Bank. Despite its cordial ties to that school for settlers, Hebrew University refuses to recognize degrees awarded by Al-Quds University, a Palestinian college in Jerusalem.

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little has been said about the almost complete destruction of Gaza’s industry and economy. As the Israeli Minister of Interior Eli Yishai said, the objective of the last operation was to “send Gaza back to the Middle Ages, destroying all of its infrastructure.”… These attacks – against factories, farms, farming equipment and homes – were not by chance or accidental. These attacks demonstrate once again that the target of the genocidal Israeli colonialism is the Palestinian people itself, and that the war that has been waging the last 66 years, under cover of Europe and the US, is against a nation, Palestine, that they seek to wipe off the map.

The report is considerably motivated by the desire to stem (indeed ban) anti-semitism. However we know that contemporary European anti-semitism, while rooted in jihadist ideology as well as historic legacies, is hugely stimulated by Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, as the big spike following last summer’s Israeli atrocities in Gaza showed. Israel has instrumentalised the Holocaust while simultaneously banning commemoration of the Nakba. Netanyahu is now shamelessly instrumentalising the recent genocidal mini-massacre of Jews in Paris. I argue that to weaken anti-semitism, rather than reinforcing these Israeli narratives by banning Holocaust denial, it is necessary to seek a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians and to challenge Israeli ideology. Recognition of the Nakba could be a powerful step in that direction. The European Council on Toleration and Reconciliation would have done better to focus on.this alternative agenda.